Guest Post: When did we mandate the State to keep us safe

A guest post from Sparticus Oblivious:

Those of us that still watch free to air TV have seen the ACC ad showing a guy who decides not to leap off the top of a waterfall, because he might hurt himself. That’s the government trying to keep us safe.

You will have seen those ads where you have to buy an expensive car, because otherwise you will die in a crash, That’s the government trying to keep us safe

We all suffered stay at home orders and mask mandates in 2020, that was the government trying to keep us safe….. from a fricken virus

Wellington Library was buzzing with people in February of 2019, In March it was too dangerous to enter, that’s councils trying to keep us safe

Sky rockets are banned, we slip slop and slap instead of putting on tanning lotion, Jungle gyms and Bull Rush are banned and lint in your drier is going to burn your house down.

Safe safe safe, who can argue against safe

Well umm, me

If we are turned towards safety, what are we turned away from? Adventure, Mission, excitement, Entrepreneurship a life well lived.

How about we populate our speech with words like; stoic, Heroic, Courageous, Resilient, Brave Characterful, self-reliant, rather than the contemporary and often psychological values like; Safe, Kind, Compassionate, Vulnerable, victim. The latter all have their place, but let’s not put them at the top of the values pyramid.

I have a mate who spent his whole life doing Health and Safety in a large organisation but get him on the ski field and he’s a demon for speed and probably unconsciously, the thrill of danger that goes with it. All the young ones on the ski field have their helmets on, not him, he’s the personification of a pre airbag car.

So going back to our mate deciding whether to jump off the top of the waterfall

Of course he should jump. Youth is about being foolhardy, It’s about bad decisions, it’s about doing things that are genuinely dangerous. 

If he went bravely to the top of the waterfall and leaped in, the women thereabouts would unconsciously know which of the parade of mediocrity in front of them they should mate with 

They would know the brave leaper to be exciting and forthright and likely consummate the gene splicing there and then.

To precis Thoreau, “we need to live deliberately… and let us not, when we come to die, discover that we have not lived”

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